Fun with midterms

I'm snowed in with a pile of midterm exams, which could be drudgery--but it isn't. My students did not appear to be having much fun while writing these exams, but I'm having a lot of fun reading them. This particular exam allows students to show their understanding of particular works of literature, and some of them have some really exciting ideas.

I use this exam format about once each semester in a sophomore-level literature class, this time in my American Lit Survey. It's a one-page exam listing seven or eight bold-faced topics, with three works of literature listed beneath each topic. Student write about four topics, one that I choose and three that they choose. For instance, since this class just finished a unit on modernism, everyone had to respond to this topic:

Modernism
Jean Toomer, Cane
Wallace Stevens, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"
Susan Glaspell, Trifles

I'm reading a lot of responses talking about the use of fragments and various perspectives in each of these works, the primacy of the discrete image and the difficulty of developing a definitive understanding of "truth." Other topics students could select include The Human Condition (Prufrock, Long Day's Journey Into Night, and a poem from Spoon River Anthology), The Past (Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto, "The Gift Outright," and "The Negro Speaks of Rivers"), and the Purpose of Literature ("The Snows of Kilimanjaro," Langston Hughes's "I, Too," and Marianne Moore's "Poetry").

Students like this exam format because they can write about what they know--but they dislike it because they have to write like crazy to complete four responses in just 50 minutes. I tell them up front that I'm not looking for well-crafted essays; instead, they should do whatever it takes to demonstrate understanding of the topics and the works of literature. I'll even accept bullet points and lists as long as the meaning is clear.

It's true that students end up writing about only four topics and only twelve works of literature, but here's the glory of the format: they don't know what topics and works will be on the exam, so they have to be prepared to write about everything we've read. I give them an example of an exam from a previous year, and I tell them that the required question will concern modernism, but each year I change some of the topics and some of the works, so they have to study everything.

And here's my favorite part: instead of grading memorized mind-dumps, I'm immersed in real ideas. Some of the handwriting is pretty rough, but the ideas I'm encountering are worth the effort. They get it! They really get it! Most of the points I'm deducting are for failure to complete a topic, although there are some occasional gaps in understanding of topics or works. And occasionally I encounter an idea that makes me smile and say, "Huh. I've never thought of it that way before."

A literature exam that can teach me a thing or two--that's my idea of a good time.